A philosopher's stone or lapis philosophorum is a legendary substance capable of turning lead into gold. It is my hope that this blog will polish some of my (and possible yours as well) rough and confused philosophical musings into nuggets of things more valuable.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Is the Indian Caste System a form of Racism?

I've only read a few articles on the
philosophy of race and critical race theory so I'm not sure about
this area of philosophy but it seems that the question of whether the caste system of India (actually, there are many kinds of caste
systems in practice today in India but I elide on this unnecessary
complication) ought to be classified as a racist institution needs to
be seriously addressed. It would obviously have large implications
morally and legally for a large swath of humanity if it is deemed
such. I don't know if the question has been addressed in the
philosophical community but from what I have cursorily read about the
caste system from the wikipedia page, the objections to such a
classification (usually the one's from Indian sociologists) are quite
lame.

The objection from these objectors to the
racism charge is that castes are not races and so any discrimination
among castes cannot be construed as racism or racial discrimination.
Because they say that members of different castes are of the same
race, the discrimination lower castes face, though may be repugnant,
is still not racial discrimination.

This line of reasoning is based on a misunderstand how contemporary race theorists understand racism
(see here for one example of a contemporary understanding of racism). Nearly all contemporary race
theorists AFAIK do not understand racism to be defined by
mistreatment necessarily from different races. They have good reason
for this. For one, race is notoriously difficult to define and thus what constitutes discrimination on that basis is not clear. Furthermore, members of the same race may be racist towards each other.
In other words, race component in racism is in the eyes of the
beholder, or more specifically, the eyes of the perpetrators of
discrimination or the negative intentional, racial attitudes. If
members of a group sees racial differences in another group and
treats them or have attitudes towards them that are discriminatory
then that would be racist even if those differences are illusory and not in anyway biologically, physically instantiated.
Also, remember that someone can be racist towards their own race.

Consider the racism that was met out to
the Jews during Nazi Germany. That was racism as most race experts
would agree though most German Jews are indistinguishable physically
(and cluster closely even genetically) from “Aryan” Germans. The
racial differences were merely in the eyes of the Nazis, i.e., they
were wholly illusory. The Jews (among many other victims such as
Gypsies and Slavs) were treated as somehow fundamentally different by
their “racial essence” their “blood” according to their
“Aryan” counterparts in society. That viewpoint from the
perspective of the perpetrators is what counts, not the actual “race”
(whatever that is) of the victim vis a vis the perpetrators. Also
consider the genocide in Rwanda. The Tutsi and Hutu are physically
(and linguistically, genetically and culturally) almost
indistinguishable from each other. However the genocides they have
committed against each other (in the 70s and 90s) are indeed racial
in nature.

It was racial because the perpetrators
each time saw their enemies, the people they would go on to
exterminate as somehow fundamentally different in essence from them.
That essence can be passed down from one generation to the next and
is, for the most part, viewed as immutable. That sounds rather like
the ideology behind caste system!

Objectors to the caste-as-racism theory
may object that though “actual race” is irrelevant to racism, the
caste system is still not racist because the categories of races are
a western categorization. But descriptively, there may be little to
no difference between how the caste system structures society along
the same lines as how racism structures society (i.e. based on
perceived inherent abilities of groups that are passed down through
generations). One may respond that any semantic hairsplitting is just
an apologia for such oppressive practices as the caste system
inherently may be.

One may wonder if different intuitions
that separates a descriptivist versus a direct reference theory of
language is at the heart of this issue. Descriptivists may say, “hey,
if it walks like a duck, quacks like duck, it is a duck!” Thus
because the caste system has all the qualitative hallmarks of a
racialist institution (walking and quacking along perceived similar
lines as racism), it is a racist institution. But direct reference
theorists such as a causal reference theorist may say that the word
“racism” has certain cultural connections to how they have been
actually used in the west to refer to specific institutions and do
not reference to other institutions no matter how qualitatively
similar.

This brings up the issue of whether
even if the direct reference theorists (or those who share that kind
of intuition) are correct about the caste system, that would only be
an empty victory for the caste system apologists because such a
system though not “de jure” racist may be justifiably then deemed
“de facto” racist especially if the institutions are extremely
harmful like they are in actual racism (and there seems to be wide
agreement that the caste system is extremely harmful to members of
certain lower castes).

So if India has such widespread
institutions of racism (or something very much like it) then it ought
to motivate the civilized world to action in abolishing such
oppressive institutions. India has already begun since the 1950s
policies which aim at ameliorating the negative effects of caste
discrimination. But it is still a largely caste society; sentiments
towards different caste divisions still run deep in society and even if
there are no more negative ostensible effects from the caste system,
it may still be inherently oppressive system (or set of systems) and
worth abolishing completely. Indeed the UN has already denounced Indian caste system as racism before.